About Allie Martin

TUPELO, Miss. (WCBI) – An 18 year old girl from our region is making a name for herself in the art of custom cake decorating. When Summer Williams has any free time, she can usually be found here, in the back room of Creative Cakes . The recent TCPS graduate developed an interest in culinary arts at a young age.

“Even in my kindergarten career day I came to career day as a chef,” Williams said.

Five years ago, Summer took her first cake decorating class at the bakery, a few years later she was hired to work the front counter, she helped customers, rang up their orders and did other duties, but as she learned more, Summer began decorating cakes. Her bosses knew early on that Summer had a special gift.

“It didn’t take long to realize that Summer had a great talent in her, it was just a matter of pulling it out of her and everyday she amazes with learning new stuff,” said Holly Whitworth, who teaches cake decorating classes at Creative Cakes.

Her creativity and artistic flair was on display recently at the ICES, or International Cake Exploration Societe’s convention, in Kentucky. She took a four layer, self designed cake and showed it off to other master decorators and bakers.

“It’s a design I came up with, I went and looked for inspiration and found a piece of fabric I liked, that’s what inspired me to use those colors on that, started with one tier and worked my way down. Top tier and second tier is hand painted with edible food coloring. Probably took about 14 hours to do, overall,” Summer said.

Summer enjoys working on specialty cakes and her skills have earned her a spot at Johnson and Wales University in North Carolina. There she will work on a culinary arts degree and also earn a business degree in food service management. She has definite plans after her four years in college.

“I would like to take that and eventually own my own bakery, maybe one day I will have my own show or own a bakery that’s really popular,” she said.

With her talent, drive and determination, Summer is poised for a sweet career.